The present invention relates generally to computer services and more particularly to a system for providing a user of a computerized real estate service with geographic reference information.
The Internet is rapidly evolving into a major shopping medium for consumers. Everything, including books, CDs, automobiles, and real estate, can be advertised, auctioned, sold, purchased, or otherwise researched on-line. Moreover, many of these items are offered on a variety of different Internet sites. Hence, the Internet user (i.e., consumer or purchaser) is in the position of choosing among competing Internet sites offering the same or similar goods and services. Thus, to differentiate itself, an Internet site must offer the user some added value.
Real estate shopping is rapidly becoming an important on-line shopping activity. Internet based real estate services offer numerous advantages over traditional real estate services. For example, in traditional real estate shopping, purchasers rely on real estate agents to provide information about properties that meet selected criteria of price and location. Additionally, the purchasers must spend many hours collecting and reviewing various real estate advertising publications. By contrast, Internet real estate services provide the real estate purchaser with much of the same information, some of it once exclusively available to agents, with the click of a mouse button.
Typically, when a prospective real estate purchaser identifies a property of interest, the purchaser learns the property""s street address and little else. In such a case, the purchaser must supplement the information provided to better understand the location of the property. For example, the purchaser could rely on the personal knowledge of a real estate agent to learn more precisely the location of the property.
In some on-line real estate services, the purchaser may employ mapping technology to place the property in context geographically, i.e., by plotting a point representing the property on a map of the area. While such mapping technology is useful, it still does not present the purchaser with the information that may be of primary importance. In particular, a purchaser is typically most interested in how far his prospective new home is from the workplace, schools, mass transportation, or like points-of-interest.
Thus, there is a need for an on-line real estate service that provides a prospective purchaser with location information about a prospective property and provides that location information in a context useful to the purchaser.
The present invention is generally directed to an interactive, Internet-based real estate service that has an integrated property searching service. The real estate service employs a database of real property listings and a user interface permitting users to define points-of-interest. The points-of-interest defined by a particular user are stored and used to calculate distances to properties selected from the property listings database. The distances can be presented in terms of linear distances or driving distances. In this manner, the user may interactively adjust his search criteria while observing how far the newly identified property listings are from the defined points-of-interest.
In an exemplary embodiment of the invention, the buyer identifies one or more points-of-interest by address or from a list generated by the system based on a property of interest. After identifying the points-of-interest, the points are converted to xe2x80x9cgeocodes,xe2x80x9d preferably by searching an address-to-geocodes database. A geocode is simply defined as a latitude and longitude pair that correspond to a specific location. A similar conversion process is used to obtain the geocodes for the property of interest. The geocodes of the points-of-interest and the property of interest are then used in an algorithm that determines linear distance, driving distance, or the like, between each point-of-interest and the property of interest. The distance information can then be displayed in a manner usable by the user, for example, to allow the user to compare properties of interest.